We’ve been working hard on this for months now, and we
are now ready to launch our second Kickstarter campaign. This time we’re
raising the money to pay for producing the pilot episode:

Lunatics Animated Series Pilot – “No Children in Space”

For those of you who’ve been following this project from early on: we
originally thought we might do this in smaller stages, but my
experience and observations of Kickstarter has made me think that it’s a
much better strategy to try to fund the pilot in one go. We also had
much better luck with finding support from voice actors and 3D modelers
than I originally anticipated. In other words, things are going so well,
they have exceeded my expectations, and so we’ve raised our goals
accordingly.

We are nominally raising $100,000 (our Kickstart minimum) for this
production. Even in the lowest-margin case, that will guarantee a
$60,000 production budget, which we’ve estimated is the bare minimum to
get the pilot produced. The budget might be higher due to the particular
breakdown of the rewards purchased (for example, lots of sponsorships
and other “prestige” rewards means lower reward production costs and the
extra money can go into production) or we might go over our Kickstarter
minimum.

If we get to a $90,000 production budget ($150,000 sales), then we
will actually produce TWO episodes: “No Children in Space” and “Earth”.
For $120,000 budget ($200,000 sales) we can make three, and for $150,000
budget ($250,000 sales), we can finish ALL FIVE of the episodes in
“Block 1” (it gets cheaper to make the episodes as we go, because we’ll
reuse many of the assets we developed for the early episodes — 3D
animation has very “front loaded” expenses). I know the accounting is
complicated, but I’ll post updates as we go to show where we actually
are in terms of production budget (and don’t be freaked out if we get
past $60,000 before we reach 100% — as agonizing that is, it’s actually expected:
we still have to make 100% in order to get any of that money).

Of course, if we don’t get to those “stretch goals”, that’s okay too
— in that case we’ll run an additional Kickstarter after the pilot is
finished in order to fund the rest of the Block 1 episodes (and when
Block 1 is finished, we’ll try to fund Block 2, and then Block 3, which
will finish Season 1 as planned (17 episodes in all)). Beyond that?
Well, we’ll have to see how far the support goes!

We are really, REALLY psyched about getting this far on our project, and we’ll be posting more updates as we go!